55. St. Galler Anwenderforum 2026

The St.Gallen Anwenderforum is the exclusive conference event at the Institute of Information Systems and Digital Business (IWI-HSG) at the University of St.Gallen. For 20 years, it has brought together more than 100 practitioners from a wide range of industries each year, offering a platform for exchange and discussion on current questions of digitalisation, IT, and business innovation.

With this year's focus on "Digital Sovereignty and Resilience in the Age of Cloud and AI", we direct our attention to how companies can harness the potential of cloud and AI technologies in a targeted way, without losing control over their data, processes, and strategic capacity to act.

Cloud and AI technologies open up new potential for innovation and efficiency. At the same time, they shift business-critical data, processes, and increasingly even decision-making logic into external infrastructures. If one of these infrastructures fails, if regulatory conditions change at short notice, or if political tensions arise, the operational impact can be immediate. This raises the demands on security, governance, compliance, and crisis resilience. At the heart of this year's Anwenderforum is the practical question of how companies can align their IT architecture, governance models, and provider strategies to enable innovation while remaining able to act even under regulatory, technical, or geopolitical pressure.

Discover how companies address these areas of tension in concrete terms, and which architectural, organisational, and strategic decisions prove decisive. The focus is on field-tested approaches for combining the capacity to innovate with digital sovereignty, controllability, and resilience. Discuss design options with us, ranging from multi-cloud strategies and data and model sovereignty to governance and risk management, as well as the question of how digital sovereignty and resilience can be embedded structurally and permanently within organisations.